Clara
The forest felt heavier the closer we got. Every step toward the prison twisted my stomach tighter.
Fear still lived inside me. It would be a lie to say it didn’t. I had spent a week inside that place… watching prisoners dragged away screaming, watching them come back broken and barely alive.
My body remembered the cold stone. The iron chains. The helplessness.
But something else burned stronger now.
Rage.
Rage for the witches in those cells. For the wolves forced to endure wolfsbane injections day after day. For the fae locked away like animals. For the vampires starved and weakened. And for the man walking somewhere behind us in the darkness.
Xavier.
My father.
The thought still felt unreal. Twenty-one years. Twenty-one years he had been locked in that dungeon while I grew
